Kick off ELIXIR-EXCELERATE crop and forest plants use case

On 1-2 October 2015 the crop and forest plants use case (WP7) of ELIXIR-EXCELERATE held their kick-off meeting in Hinxton. Collaborators involved in this use case will work closely with the plant and crop research communities to establish standards and services for the open sharing of genotypic and phenotypic data. The priority for WP7 over the coming six months will be to select a first batch of datasets for annotation, investigate key ontologies, and establish minimum information guidelines.

Richard Finkers of Wageningen UR Plant Breeding attended the kick off on behalf of ELIXIR-NL. Finkers’ department has extensive expertise in phenotypic and genotypic data from large collections of solanaceous crops (tomato & potato). ELIXIR-NL will bring in this expertise and make the resources available according to the FAIR specifications as part of the currently existing web-based databases.

In EXCELERATE ELIXIR-NL is involved in:

• WP 4 ( E-infra),
• WP 5 (Interoperability),
• WP 7 (Use case: Integrating Genomic and Phenotypic Data for Crop and Forest Plants),
• WP 8 (Use case: ELIXIR infrastructure for Rare Disease research),
• WP 9 (Use case: Human data) and
• WP11 (Training).